The Last War: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller

by Ryan Schow

  “We just need a place to stay,” he says, changing tact.

  “How many are you?” I ask. I want to know if this is going to be a bigger problem. I want to know if I have to go from pretending to be unhinged to actually pulling the trigger.

  “Mom?” Macy says from behind me. Thunder crashes through me now, and I feel everyone go perfectly still. Everyone but the man with gun.

  The man I can’t see but in shadow.

  I want to tell her to shut up; Stanton wants to tell her the same. Neither of us say a word because that’s the kind of distraction that gets you killed. The kind of distraction that gets everyone killed.

  “Me and my brother and his two kids,” the voice finally says. Then: “Well, just me and his kids now that you’ve killed my brother. Do you just have the one?”

  “Where are the kids?” Stanton asks.

  “Downstairs,” he tells us.

  “Perfect,” I say, working like the devil to force any anxiety from my voice. “When I get done with you, I’ll hunt both of them down and end them, too. Now get your brother the hell out of our house or I swear to God, I won’t wait for you to shoot him before I shoot you.”

  Thankfully I hear the rustling in the darkness, see a shadow bend over and grab the dead body’s leg. Slowly the interloper is dragged from our house.

  “This isn’t over,” he mutters.

  “See, when you say things like that,” I reply, “it means next time I see you I shoot first, then don’t ask questions later.”

  Stanton shuts the door and we both listen to the man being dragged down the stairwell, shoulders and head knocking each and every wooden step on the way down. We hear the front door open. It bangs shut a moment later. Stanton peeks out the open window, scanning the street below. I join him, look over his shoulder. The two kids the would-be intruder was talking about, they aren’t there. It’s just the guy and his dead…whomever.

  “Liar,” I mutter.

  “Scumbag,” Stanton grumbles.

  The tremors I managed to hold at bay overtake my body, leaving me jittery and high, too juiced on adrenaline to calm down. At this point I’m all fits and starts and it’s terribly uncomfortable.

  On the street below, the idiot that lived drops the one who didn’t on the sidewalk. He heads across the street and starts trying other doors. He’s a skinny thing with a lanky walk and a head full of ratty hair. He’s a hundred and fifty pounds at best, maybe less.

  “I’ll keep watch,” Stanton says. “You get some sleep.”

  “Will someone please tell me what just happened?” Macy asks.

  Stanton turns and says, “What have I taught you that makes you think you should ever open your mouth in a situation like that?” The torrid break in his voice is fear and frayed nerves. To Macy, I’m sure it sounds like anger.

  “I—I just…”

  “She was scared,” I tell Stanton, making little fists of my hands to still the tremors.

  “You can’t afford to be that stupid,” he snaps. “You could’ve gotten us killed.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Stanton,” I say, calmly.

  It’s a warning for him to back off. He knows why, and he knows he should, but he just killed a man and this has yet to sit right with him. It’s always like this after he takes a life.

  “When it’s this dark and you speak,” Stanton says, his tone barely tempered, “you not only alert these men who broke into our home that you’re here, you announce that you’re a girl.”

  We’ve been hearing too much about all the rapes lately. And about the murders that follow. These are quickly becoming ungovernable times, dreadful times.

  “Okay,” Macy says.

  “We were all scared, Macy,” I explain. “Dad more than all of us because if anything happened to you, he couldn’t bear it. Neither of us could.”

  “Did you at least have your gun in hand?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she replies.

  “Are you kidding me, Stanton?” I say. “We talked about this!”

  “And I listened. But listening isn’t the same as agreeing, and I don’t agree with you, so she keeps the gun and that’s that.”

  As much as I hate that Stanton went against my better wishes, part of me is glad she was armed. And it was this situation that made me realize that Stanton and Rex were right about her having a gun.

  “Next time,” I tell her, “when your gun is out, your mouth stays shut. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  With nothing left to say, and the threat over, Macy lays back down, pulls the blankets over her. I crawl into bed as well because the house is so cold I’m practically shivering. Stanton sits at the table with the knife, contemplative as usual. I wonder if he’s gathering up all the madness he feels. I wonder if the onslaught of emotions is swirling in his head like a hurricane, tearing up the landscape of his mind, eating away his humanity one kill at a time. To me, that’s what it looks like. That’s what it always looks like.

  As I lay there in bed, alone, replaying the events in my mind, working my way through the fears that set my teeth on edge, I can’t help but acknowledge the rise of my darker impulses. Lately they’ve been crawling out of their black corners, forcing upon me thoughts I don’t want to have, making me think I can do things I would never have done in more civil times.

  I don’t want to tell Stanton this. It’s because of my earlier stance against violence. These days, my faith in scavenging for food is waning. I’ve been toying with the idea of taking what we need from someone who already has it. Someone like us. Someone alive.

  Resorting to violence and larceny may gain us a few more months of food (the more civilized side of me reasons), but will we be able to live with ourselves if we steal from people like us? If we kill them for their things? Perhaps. If this keeps my family alive. And this is the thought that scares me most. It makes me wonder what I’m truly capable of.

  “You sounded like a badass, Mom,” Macy finally says.

  “I nearly peed myself,” I admit.

  “This is never going to end,” Stanton tells us both, turning the knife in his hand. His voice sounds so strained, so rippled with tension, I’m starting to think maybe he’s losing it. Maybe we’re all losing it. Maybe we’ve all lost it and we just don’t know it yet.

  A long time passes. Macy should be asleep. “Macy?” I whisper into the darkness.

  “Still awake.”

  “Just checking,” I tell her. To Stanton I say, “At some point in time, they have to realize they’re wasting their resources on us.”

  “We’re already broken,” he says. “They don’t care.” Then after a minute, he says, “Does it smell like mold in here? It smells like mold to me.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine,” he laments. “Do you know what mold can do to a person’s immune system?”

  “There are worse things out there than mold, Stanton.” After awhile, when the silence feels so opaque it seems unbearable, I say, “Thank you for protecting us tonight.”

  “You did just as much as I did,” he says, nearly emotionless.

  “Well thank you anyway.”

  16

  The crush of noise and destruction wakes us all. That’s how it is. How it’s been every day since this nightmare began. Stanton’s head lifts off the kitchen table, and at the same time, I pull the pillow over my ears. The attacks are closer than normal.

  Sitting up, I wonder, is today going to be the day?

  “Can we please go find something good to eat?” Macy says. “I’m tired of oatmeal in a cup.”

  So I guess Macy’s awake. She’s rolling over, sitting up as well. Her eyes look red and swollen, like she hasn’t slept. I know exactly how she feels.

  “Did you sleep okay?” I ask.

  “No.”

  She’s shoving off the blanket, putting feet into shoes that aren’t hers—shoes that fit, but don’t match.

  When I was young, I remember reading
about the forced labor camps in Auschwitz. When the Jews and Jewish sympathizers were transported into the death camps, those who died or were gassed, they were stripped of their shoes which were tossed into huge piles. When a person needed new shoes, soldiers grabbed two from the giant pile and threw them at the prisoners. One might be a size nine man’s boot while the other could be a size six woman’s heel. Someone once said more people were exterminated for foot related infections than for any other reason. I think they might be misinformed, but I can’t be sure. It was probably just small talk with a sprinkling of exaggeration.

  The point is, in times like this, you take what you’re given and do your best to make it work. That’s all we’re doing—trying our best to make this work.

  Looking over by the front door, there’s arterial blood spray on the wall and a smeared pond of dried blood all along the old hardwood floor leading into the hallway. My eyes flick over to Stanton, see the dried gore on his hands and shirt, see it shot along the side of his face. He looks like the victim, not so much like the predator who put the victim down.

  “You should wash up, Stanton. Just in case.”

  “It’s fine,” he says, looking at the blood under his fingernails. The man used to buy the most expensive hand lotions and face creams; now he’s got some dead guy’s blood in his hair and all over his face and it doesn’t even faze him. This is massive progress for a clean freak. Does it seem crazy to you that I’m proud of him right now? Well I am, in a funny sort of way.

  “You look like a horror show,” I say. “And that beard has to go.”

  “The beard is staying.”

  “If you can’t do it for you,” I say, “at least do it for us.”

  He spits in his hand, uses it and his shirt to wipe his face. It only makes matters worse, but at least he’s trying. Or maybe he’s pitching a fit. I can’t tell.

  Whatever pride I feel in him stalls the second another bomb hits. That’s how things are now. We’re living a minute-by-minute existence with no guarantees of anything, and that sort of trumps everything. Even these pint sized moments of satisfaction have the shortest of shelf-lives.

  I drag myself out of bed, my skin breaking into gooseflesh immediately, it’s that cold. No one wants to talk about how cold it is but me. Same as always. Twice I nearly lay a fire, but I stop each time because Stanton will just tell me no, that we need to conserve our resources for when we really need them. What he’s really saying is if the drones or the pee-dee see smoke coming from our chimney, one or both of them will level this whole place in no time flat.

  From a small pile of confiscated clothes, I drag a sweater over my head, find my way into a dirty pair of jeans. My shoes are comfortable, but they’re only a few walking miles away from splitting at the seams. Avoiding the bathroom mirror (as usual), I ask Macy to French braid my hair, which she does, then I scrape the fronts of my teeth clean with a fingernail. Macy and I check our guns, then check each other. After that we both look at Stanton, pinning him down with serious eyes.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he grouses.

  Like Macy, he’s so skinny the sight of him hurts me. He’s changing shirts. I look away, unable to take in the sight of all those bones, how he doesn’t have much fat left on his body. I busy myself with something. Anything. If we make it through the day, I’m going to tell him he needs to start eating his fair share of food.

  After a luxurious breakfast of oatmeal and water, we head outside in a tight pack of three, our senses attuned to everything, our minds ready for anything. You never know when people are going to crack. When they’ll snap on you, or others around you.

  Down by the Best Buy (bombed and flattened), this old woman with a grocery cart used to scream at everyone she walked by. She really put herself into it. Then one day she let go of her cart and went after a little boy. The mother of the boy shot the woman with a pop gun and just left her there to die. Sometimes, when I think about her, I wonder if the screamer was the lucky one.

  Outside, the guy Stanton killed the night before is dead on the sidewalk. Across the street his buddy is dead, too. Slumped over in the gutter, his chest a dark bloom.

  “Wrong neighborhood to pick a fight, buddy,” I mutter.

  “You know Rex did that,” Stanton says, nodding to the guy across the street.

  Macy won’t stop looking at the body in front of her. I finally grab her hand and say, “C’mon, honey. It’s not polite to stare.”

  “I don’t think he’ll mind.”

  Over the last few weeks, we’ve learned to protect what’s ours. You need to do that. To think like that. So—first things first—we don’t let people get too close to us without us showing them our guns.

  Some say we’re anti-social. I won’t disagree.

  We’re staying inside Anza Vista just north of the panhandle in our three story residence teetering on the edge of ruin. I don’t expect you to know about that area specifically, but right now, you can’t squat on our block without having big boy nuts. There’s not a lot of us left, and we don’t really mingle at this point, but if you don’t belong in this neighborhood, you learn real quick to get out or get dead.

  The reason I’m saying this is that we’ve been forced to protect this place so someone doesn’t do to us what we did to the old lady who lived here before us. Stanton killed two people last week. He didn’t even hesitate. That’s how it’s becoming.

  That’s exactly how it has to be.

  The second trip to Laurel Heights was as good an idea as the first trip. That’s where we found tonight’s dinner. A near frozen pot roast. We even manage to make it back to our place alive, so there’s cause for an almost-celebration.

  Near dark, when the drones and pee-dee have all gone back to wherever it is they’ve gone back to, we lay a small fire. The warmth is amazing. Like sunbathing in Southern California on a ninety degree day by a hotel pool filled with beautiful vacationers. Except this isn’t Southern California, there is no sun and the only thing beautiful about this place is the sunsets after a full day of bombing.

  Honestly, the colors the destruction of this city makes at sunset are out of this world.

  Sitting in the flames is the roast we procured from the bottom of an ice chest after about six or seven hours of rummaging through places much nicer than ours on Commonwealth Avenue. We’re not sure if it’s any good, but if it isn’t, we’ll eat what we can and toss the rest.

  “Bowls?” I ask. The sun is setting. Our light is quickly going away.

  On the streets below, a couple of our neighbors are mingling in between the distant sounds of small- to medium-range artillery fire and the occasional blast of something big blowing up a little further out. Maybe these are pipe bombs from the locals. Maybe it’s the last of the bombing runs by the drones.

  Stanton fetches us three mismatched bowls and we wait for dinner to finish heating. After a few minutes, with a pair of rusted BBQ tongs, I pull the meat from the fire, shave off the cooked outsides, divide its between us. It tastes overly salted, but then again, so does everything else.

  What really scares, what we don’t ever talk about, is that there’s no new food. Pretty soon we’re going to have to start hunting live prey. Birds, rabbits, dogs. Who knows? When you’re hungry, you’ll eat just about anything. Maybe even each other. Look at Venezuela. They even ate the animals at the zoo.

  So one minute we’re carving up more meat in silence, the next minute a bomb drops a block or two over, making the whole building jump. Fresh cracks snake up the sides of the wall. Dust falls like snow from the ceiling.

  “Should I put out the fire?” I ask, hesitant yet cautious.

  “It’ll smoke too much,” Stanton replies.

  Sitting in filthy clothes, exhaustion nagging at my bones, I grip my bowl and Macy’s hand and I wait. My heart is kicking way too hard. Can a healthy woman in her early thirties survive a heart attack in conditions like these? Most days I’d say yes; other days I pray for a quick death.

&
nbsp; “Hurry up,” Stanton tells Macy. “Eat in case we have to go.”

  “What about Gunner?”

  He stands up, takes the bowl of meat upstairs to Gunner, then returns and says, “I invited him down, but he just shook his head and thanked me.”

  “He still hasn’t come to grips with the fact that his parents are probably dead,” Macy says. “And you and Rex scare him.”

  “That’s because he’s got sissy blood running through his veins,” Stanton says.

  “Hey,” I say, “that’s not fair.”

  By then, Stanton’s already working on another cut of meat. I finish with mine and Macy finishes with hers. We eat until we’re full, then put the meat in the fridge for tomorrow.

  “Do you think when they get tired of this nickel-and-dime stuff,” I ask, “the bombs will get bigger, maybe even turn nuclear?”

  “I still want to know why they don’t attack us at night,” Macy says.

  We’ve all been wondering it, and we have no idea. It’s not like the drones need time off. They’re not exhausted. They don’t need to sleep.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “Rex says they don’t have enough bombs to run 24/7. Maybe they’re rearming themselves.”

  “What if they start?” Macy asks. “What if they make enough bullets and bombs to go all night long?”

  “Then it’s going to be pretty hard to get any sleep around here,” Stanton replies, and that’s that.

  We don’t continue this line of discussion because it will only take us down darker, more depressing roads. That’s the last thing we need.

  The sun is gone from the sky completely, casting the last of its eerie orange glow over the nightmare that is San Francisco. Not too far from here, clouds of smoke billow into the already dismal sky. Night settles in. Silence follows. Even small arms fire comes to a stop.

  Hours later we’re not so on edge.

  Just before bed, while Stanton is still awake, the tears come. I try to stop them, but it’s too easy to let them go. It’s Macy that brought me to tears. This sniffling, it’s all because I can’t stop thinking that my daughter is just fifteen, that she doesn’t deserve any of this. She’s yet to be kissed, to find a suitable mate, to fall in love. She’s got such a strong spirit…she deserves these things! I close my eyes, turn away, contemplate safer circumstances.